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Lance Hornby, QMI Agency

TORONTO - We’ll see next season if Randy Carlyle can get ‘Big Blue’ to play blue-collar hockey.

Whether it’s in the Maple Leafs’ DNA or not, it’s bound to be a long and eventful three-year hitch for Carlyle and everyone concerned.

“Randy is pure Sudbury,” said former Leafs teammate and sportscaster Jim McKenny. “That (working class) attitude sees him through everything in life and I think that will continue. He’s a guy who paid his dues.”

“Watching the Leafs right now, you see they’re a team where everything has to work together or it goes down the toilet. Pittsburgh can play really crappy one night, too, but they have Malkin and Crosby, who will get a couple of goals and save everyone else. That’s the challenge for Randy and (assistant) Dave Farrish.”

Carlyle’s first full season has already been sneak-previewed in past weeks with heavy stress on skating, conditioning and defensive zone play. Not everyone will like it and some top six forwards and slower defencemen have already been exposed. And Carlyle doesn’t apologize for reeling in Ron Wilson’s run-and-gun offence or re-instating an enforcer such as Jay Rosehill.

There is no turning back now. With few stars in their mix, eager but unproven youth and a bleak free agent crop forecasted, general manager Brian Burke can only hope that Carlyle can prod the Leafs to the low-rung playoff spot they were in line for prior to their February freeze.

Burke already has seen Carlyle engineer a similar quick turnaround, taking the 2005-06 Anaheim Ducks from 11th to the conference final in one year and winning the Stanley Cup the next.

Inheriting a strong Ducks team, Carlyle was able to inject more emotion in the room and purpose on the ice. They jumped 22 points and took the Flames to a Game 7 quarterfinal in Calgary. That’s when Carlyle scrapped the usual X’s and O’s and showed his different side.

“Instead of skating the day before Game 7, Randy took them all to a pool hall,” recalled beat writer Dan Wood, now the team’s radio analyst. “They shot some pool while Randy showed video of himself when he played (in the NHL), doing all the wrong things. It lightened up everything and they went out and won, 3-0.”

The next year, Anaheim had 110 points, lost only five playoff games in four rounds and defeated Ottawa in the final. But barely had the celebration ended when people wondered a) could they repeat and b) wouldn’t fictional Ducks coach Gordon Bombay have won with that can’t-miss lineup?

Yet, Carlyle’s critics are quick to point out what happened in the ensuing years. Repeating as champion is hard in a 30-team NHL, but the Ducks have suffered from chronic poor starts. Five out of six times entering this season, Carlyle pushed the right buttons at crunch time and the Ducks made the playoffs, but have only one series win since 2007.

The Ducks definitely tuned out Carlyle back in the autumn, unable to play through any adversity. Nothing Carlyle tried, from his manic line changes to his hard-driving practices, shook up the team. Rather than sweat out another turnaround, GM Bob Murray fired his coach in late November and brought in Bruce Boudreau, Carlyle’s one-time Leafs teammate.

It’s likely Burke had Carlyle on speed dial when the Leafs began sliding in early February. Carlyle landed in the maelstrom March 3 and was put in charge of the second-youngest team in the league.

The 56-year-old’s ability to bridge that genertion gap in coming seasons will determine much of his success. Many think he was too harsh in Anaheim on young Bobby Ryan, the No. 2 overall pick in 2005, making him the whipping boy when team fortunes soured. Ryan eventually made it to a career-best 71 points last season and, though some other younger prospects haven’t developed as hoped, observers note Carlyle toned it down when tutoring 2010’s top pick, Cam Fowler.

“He has his way with the young guys,” Murray told the Orange County Register last summer. “The players are changing and I think he’s done a good job with staying up with how they have changed.”

Murray was quite succinct about what Carlyle had meant to his franchise during his six-year tenure. Only Lindy Ruff and Barry Trotz superceded Carlyle in service with the same team at the time of his departure.

“No matter what kind of team we throw at him, he finds a way to make the team try to win,” Murray said. “Sometimes it’s not as good a team as other teams. He takes what you give him and tries to win. He does very well at it, as his record indicates.”

In Toronto, the Leafs were in a playoff spot at the all-star break and then crashed in spectacular fashion a fourth straight year. Burke weighed hiring Dallas Eakins, his keen farm team coach, but opted for someone who’d already won him a Cup, where Eakins hadn’t yet experienced even an AHL playoff run. Eakins, Burke feared, would be eaten by “piranha” if tossed into the river now.

“It’s an acquired taste here,” Burke said. “Ron got tired of dealing with the media. His answers got shorter and maybe more caustic. I don’t blame Ron for getting in a sour relationship with the media because that’s what happens in a Canadian market if you don’t have success.”

Though the Leafs aren’t giving Carlyle many post-game highlights to talk about — an 11-game home losing streak entering Saturday night’s game against the Buffalo Sabres — he has supplied ample opportunity to the team’s bubble players, with an eye to off-season changes. He stuck by both goaltenders in consecutive starts longer than Wilson had, let the benched Mike Komisarek determine his own fate and has given some new duties to the marginalized Tim Connolly and Matthew Lombardi.

Where Carlyle differs from Wilson, from a public perception, is that there is no underlying current of ‘I won, they lost’.

Wilson would also pick at a player’s deficiencies in hopes the needling improved him, whereas Carlyle keeps most of that behind closed doors, wary of criticizing his players.

“You’re not going to get me to do that ... never ask me to do that,” he once yelled at those covering the minor league Manitoba Moose, farm team of the Canucks.

After an extremely fortunate 1-0 Moose win at Hamilton — Ryan Kesler lobbed one through from his own zone — Carlyle was asked about the ‘lucky’ goal. He blew his stack, demanded to know how many professsonial goals the inquisitor had ever scored, upset that anyone would disparage his men, no matter the circumstance.

Insiders say Carlyle’s team-first mantra is not an act for the 11 o’clock news, whether it’s taking minimum credit for a win or the fall for travesties such as the 8-0 loss to Boston on March 19. With the press expecting Carlyle to go Tortorella on his team that night, he calmly asserted that the coaching staff must not have prepared the players properly. But they paid the price at the next practice.

It remains to be seen if more losing will trigger firefights with the large media contingent. As a player and coach, Carlyle has had a bite to him, if only to test the other person’s mettle. Carlyle, whose Anaheim teams weren’t covered this extensively, must get used to having up to 15 or 20 reporters at an off-day practice. So far, he has been able to parry with the press and keep things civil.

He knows part of that drill having played here between 1977-79, when one of his biggest influences was behind the Leafs bench.

Carlyle’s two years under the cerebral, defensive-minded Roger Neilson made him one of four Leafs on that team headed to the NHL coaching ranks. Wilson would work the fourth-most games in NHL history, Dan Maloney owed his rapid ascension and rapid exit to the temperamental Harold Ballard.

John Anderson was extremely successful at the AHL level with the Chicago Wolves, before being caught in the Atlanta Thrashers’ coach-killing vortex. Boudreau also excelled in the AHL and won the Jack Adams Award with the Washington Capitals, but his star fell along with Alexander Ovechkin’s. There were other teammates, Jimmy Jones, Paul Gardner and Rocky Saganiuk, who had limited success coaching in junior, the minors or in Europe. But Carlyle is the first Leaf coach since George Armstrong to have a Cup ring.

“You can see Roger’s influence in Randy,” said McKenny. “And the funny thing is that Roger didn’t like Randy as a player. Thought he was too stubborn — which he was and still is. But Randy always spoke highly of Roger, even though Roger was the guy who had him traded for Dave Burrows.

“Roger knew how to delegate responsibility. He let Darryl Sittler, Borje Salming and Tiger Williams run the dressing room.”

In Anaheim, Carlyle assigned those duties to Niedermayer and Pronger. It remains to be seen if current captain Dion Phaneuf and others can gain the same level of trust and become part of Carlyle’s “leadership group”. Phaneuf and Carlyle met two days after Carlyle’s hiring.

“We talked about what my expectations were for the coach-to-captain relationship,” Carlyle said.

“It seems he’s on the same page where I’m coming from and (vice versa). It’s important that I have the pulse of what his teammates are thinking. I’ve been fortunate to have very strong captains, Hall of Fame people.”